The future of offshore wind power in France is once again up in the air. It had been hoped that phase one of the country's first offshore installation, the 105MW Cote d'Albatre project in the English Channel, would start turning in 2010.

However, it is still on hold as developers Enertrag and Prokon Nord
await a court ruling on three appeals contesting the siting permit
issued in 2008 (Winpow Monthly, September 2009).

Philippe Gouverneur, director of Enertrag France, hopes that the court
will decide before the end of the year and that there is not a further
appeal. In the meantime, financiers are unwilling to close a deal and
the budget has substantially overshot what was originally drawn up in
2004. "You have to question if it will ever be built," says Gouverneur.
One option might be to convert it to a demonstration site for offshore
wind and marine energy, along the lines of Germany's Alpha Ventus
facility, he believes.

Cote d'Albatre was the only project selected following a tender call for
500MW of offshore capacity in 2004. Just two years later the government
decided to replace competitive tendering with a guaranteed premium
price, setting the tariff at EUR0.13/kWh for the first ten years. After
that, it varies between EUR0.03/kWh for plants operating 3,900 hours or
more and EUR0.13/kWh for 2,800 hours or less.

Tariff not high enough

However, this system has not yielded results, either. For one thing,
developers say the tariff is too low. It needs to be at least
EUR0.16/kWh if France is to meet its target of 6GW of offshore wind by
2020, argues the Renewable Energy Syndicate.

Another major problem is the lack of clear regulations for offshore
wind. At present the sector is largely covered by the same rules as for
onshore wind, not all of which are appropriate: urban planning
regulations, for example, which govern siting permits; and wind power
development zones (ZDEs), areas defined by local authorities within
which plants must be built to benefit from the preferential tariff.

All being well, both those anomalies should be removed when the Grenelle
2 law is passed later this year. This is the second law to come from the
Grenelle de l'Environnement, a national summit to formulate government
environmental policy (Winpow Monthly, September 2007), and detail how
those policies will be implemented.

Under one new measure, regional authorities around the coast have been
asked to identify suitable areas for the development of offshore wind
power, taking into account the state of the grid, the presence of radar,
shipping routes and other constraints. These plans, which should be
finalised this month, will provide the basic planning tool and, it is
hoped, speed the process. Not everyone is sure, however.

Gouverneur fears that they have been drawn up in too much of a hurry and
will not be sufficiently rigorous to avoid legal challenges. Once the
plans are in place, it is anticipated that the government will revert to
competitive tendering, despite its poor record. The idea is still under
discussion, but first indications are that there will be calls for 2GW
each in 2011, 2013 and 2015, with preference for projects over 300MW.
While views on tenders are mixed, it is generally agreed that the
timetable is unrealistic in view of France's 2020 renewables goal. "It
will take a miracle to get these built in time," Gouverneur states.

But there is a general acknowledgement that, at the top at least, the
government really is keen to get things moving, not only in order to
meet its renewables targets, but also to develop new industries and
stimulate jobs. In the meantime, developers continue to work on projects
totalling around 10GW of installed capacity, according to SER. What
happens next should become clearer in the coming weeks.

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